The Path of the Bookseller

I’m still here, but most of my writing and creative efforts are happening over at The Book of Voices. I have nine pieces up there, monologues from the points of view of Moab, Aaron, Sihon, Abraham, Jonah, Hazael, Shadrach, Judah, and God.

Next is Darius the Great; I have no idea what he was doing in the Bible, but a little research will ferret that out.

Otherwise, I’ve just been dealing with work stuff. There have been a few notable events, including one of the store regulars assaulting another and my finding an intruder sleeping in the church, but I’ve haven’t written about them. The story of the assault hinges on information about one of the people involved that I wouldn’t be able to post without possibly identifying him. And finding the guy in the church ended up bothering me in a way that I can’t seem to write about.

I’m still cooking large Thursday dinners and turning the leftovers into more than a week’s worth of lunches. I’ve tried out a few new eateries here in town, but the way that my schedule works, I seem to continually end up in the same two that are open late.

I’ve been trying out various music overhead at work, limited, of course, by what we stock. I think I’ve figured out an interesting pattern: if I play popular music overhead, few people notice (except to complain when it’s too loud). But when I play different music, especially that with a sound that is immediately unusual though not annoying and which draws people in, they’ll ask about it, and odds are much higher that they’ll buy it. People are immediately curious when I play Azam Ali, Loreena McKennitt, Tomasz Stanko, or Steve Reich.

One interesting pattern is that when we play early Leonard Cohen albums, where his singing was a fairly common-sounding tenor, they only get a little interest, mostly from people who recognize them. But when we play his later work, where his voice is a gravelly whisper and the other elements are arrayed to leave room for it, people immediately head for the “Now Playing” rack. The first time that we played disc 2 of The Essential Leonard Cohen, we sold all three copies that we had in stock before the CD ended. When we got it back in stock, I put on disc 2 again, and we sold a copy within two minutes, during the opening song, “Everybody Knows.”

I’ve also noticed (and confirmed by speaking with the CD folks at other stores) that more and more people are failing to find CDs that we stock because they are assuming that they are organized by the artists’ first name. At first, I thought that this was just kinda dumb, since everything everywhere is organized by last name, but then I had an epiphany: many people now most commonly see lists of artists on their iPods or in iTunes, and unless one takes fairly arduous measures to change things, the artists are organized by their first names. So we’re stuck with a fairly annoying partial paradigm shift.

I just bought a leather jacket, perhaps inspired by msmush’s shopping in Italy. On the other hand, mine only cost $25 at Goodwill; on the other other hand (or, as John reminds me that the Moties say, the gripping hand), after wearing it for a couple of hours, I’m wondering if it might be one size too small.
That’s all I can think of now. I’m posting to The Book of Voices about once a week, so keep an eye out over there if you want to see what I’m writing. There is, of course, a handy RSS feed that you can use to tracking.

So I now return you to the previous channeling, already in progress…